• Colm Lyon left Realex after sale to Global Payments to focus on Fire Financial Services one year ago
• 250 businesses now live in beta programme
• 50,000 payments processed per month
• First businesses go live accepting fire as an payment method
• New personal app allows contactless top up and sharing of requests

Fire Financial Services is now processing over £1 million worth of payments every month in the twelve months since Colm Lyon sold Realex to Global Payments.

 Fire allows business and personal customers to open payment accounts online, instantly in the case of personal customers and in 24 hours for business clients. Accounts are available in sterling and euro – each with its own IBAN or account number so customers can process bank transfers from and to any bank in the sterling or euro zone. All transfers between Fire accounts (including FX transfers) are real time.

 Following the opening of its beta programme for businesses, Colm Lyon, CEO and founder of Fire said, “we are delighted with the response from our beta business clients – the feedback has been really positive. Giving business customers quick and easy access to sterling and euro accounts has been central to the proposition”. Business customers can also access their account data via an API which Lyon believes will be common in the future: “Integrated access to an account and its related data is another key element to banking services and we wish to be at the forefront of this”.

 Fire has also released a new version of its personal app – Pay with Fire. Available for iOS and Android, it allows users to “Tap, Snap or Type” their card details and load funds into their Fire account instantly. Personal customers can pay anyone using just their mobile number, and can now share requests for payments with their social groups using other apps on their phone, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, text, email etc.

 “We are trying to create a wonderful user experience for banking services.  Customers love the simplicity of tapping their contactless card against their NFC-enabled device to load funds into their Fire account. Opening up the sharing function for payment requests is also perfect for group requests”, added Lyon.

 With this release Lyon said that “Fire has reached a key milestone in the creation of next generation banking services as we now have live businesses also accepting Fire as a payment method”. Business customers can now use the API to request payments directly via Fire from personal customers. Several web sites (including www.younghorizons.ie and www.calcuttaconnect.ie) are now using paywithfire for online real time donations.